Italian Wine Bars Just Get It Right

If more places used the Italian enoteca model, the wine world would be a better, more inclusive place

Is the above a picture of a wine shop or a wine bar?

Well, it has shelves and people just out of shot are browsing and buying bottles to take away. It must be a shop.

Yet there are tables and chairs. Behind you, a steady stream of people are buying glasses or bottles and spilling out onto the street. So, a bar then.

Wait, there’s a bit of food too. A cheese plate. Olives. Marinated vegetables. Is this a restaurant? Can you reserve a table and eat here?

This, my friends, is an Italian enoteca, a hybrid wine store and bar, often with a few snacks slung from a tiny kitchen.

I snapped this particular picture during a visit to Rome last week but you see enotecas everywhere in Italy.

I love them because they are the best, cheapest, and most inclusive way to buy and enjoy wine. I love them so much that I used them as the blueprint for my own hybrid wine store and bar in the UK.

But in places like the UK — and the US — wine is considered a rigid, often formal thing. All suits and “would sir like to taste the wine” and swirling and sniffing. It’s for the elite, not the everyday.

But Italian enotecas don’t think so. And they’re right.

---

One of my goals as a Sommelier-turned-writer is to expose parts of the wine trade that never sat well with me. That includes the difference in wine pricing between bars and retail stores.